Fate/Grand Order

Overview

Fate/Grand Order is a mobile, turn-based game featuring the characters from the Fate Series. Like many mobile games of its kind, it features an “energy source,” known as AP in this game, which the player must use up in order to play, and which replenishes slowly over time.

The main game is broken up into different segments and labeled as Singularities, with the first one, the prologue, being set in Fuyuki 2004 which should be familiar to those who watched Fate/Zero and Fate/UBW. After that, there are currently four other singularities which take place in Orleans, Rome, Okeanos, and London.

There are also frequent special events in Fate/Grand Order. The most recent one, which I believe is still going on is called The Garden of Sinners and is set in a haunted apartment building. If you’re planning on starting the game, just keep in mind that you must complete the prologue before you can play any special events.

While there is an actual storyline to this game, I stopped paying attention to it somewhere within the First Singularity. I’m sure the translation to English from Japanese messed up a lot of things, but even looking past that, the story isn’t any good. Things I could look past in the Fate series anime, such as the conversations that happen between the various servants, I’m unable to look past in this game because they tended to get fairly off topic and I just didn’t care.

Fate/Grand Order Main Menu

Cards

Fate/Grand Order is played by collecting cards that are then added to your party. These cards are gained by “summoning” which is essentially pack opening, however, you can sometimes gain cards by completing certain missions in the game or special events.

There are two main types of cards and then a third type which I’ll consider a sub-type. First you have the Servant cards, an example of which is shown below. These cards are the actual characters you will be using to fight in the game.

Next are the Craft Essence cards. These cards are added onto Servant cards in order to power them up in some way such as healing them for a certain amount every turn.

Both the Servant and Craft Essence cards have five different rarity levels which determine how powerful they are. The rarity can be seen by the amount of stars at the top of the card; one star is common, five stars is a super secret rare.

The third sub-type of card are Experience cards. These are used to level up your Servant cards, or increase their HP and ATK stats. Craft Essence cards don’t use Experience cards, however, instead they use other Craft Essence cards to level up.

Fate/Grand Order Max Level Scathach Card

Party

A party is composed of up to six different Servants and their corresponding Craft Essence cards. An example of a party is shown in the image below.

One thing I don’t like about this game is that the third slot of your party is always reserved for what is known as a Support Servant. This is a Servant card that doesn’t belong to the player. Some missions will give the player a guest servant option to choose for this slot, but often you will be selecting the Servant of someone off your friends list or just that of another random player.

I would much rather be able to forgo the Support Servant slot and just use a sixth Servant of my own, but I think the purpose of this was to show you other Servants you don’t have in the hopes that you’ll spend actual money to unlock more cards.

At the very bottom of the screen you may notice there is a spot that says “Total Cost” and in my case it’s at 96/96. Your party’s total cost increases as you level up in the game and this is how the game sets a cap at how strong your party can be.

You may also notice that at the bottom of each of my Servants there is a cost section and that shows the cost of the Servant card along with the Craft Essence card attached to it. Higher rarity cards generally have higher costs with the maximum being 16 and 12 for Servant and Craft Essence cards respectively. However, the Support slot does not affect the cost of your party so you can add whatever you want there at the start of each mission.

Fate/Grand Order Party Setup Screen

Conclusion

In the end, the story and dialogue of this game aren’t really any good which is why it’s a good thing you can skip all the dialogue. The gameplay also is fairly lacking, but what can you really expect from a free mobile game?

Really, the best part of this game is collecting all the cards and leveling them up. If you’re someone like me who loves collecting things and leveling them up in games, then this is the game for you. To prove how much I love that sort of thing, I even completed the Pokédex in the past couple of Pokémon games (with around half at level 100) and found all 900 Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild.

If I have to rate this game, I think I’d give it a solid 6/10 mostly because I’m just not much of a fan of mobile games. The game does look nice though and we all know that’s what really matters.

Finally, if you play Fate/Grand Order as well and would like to add me as a friend, my friend code is listed below.